TheBanyanTree: Literary pretensions and me. one of these things not like the other

[Theta Brentnall]

I'm almost afraid to ask, but did the audience have as much fun as the 
three of you?  Watching the poor interviewer being batted back and forth 
among you like a shuttlecock would have been worth the price of 
admission alone.

Theta

On 6/9/2015 9:26 PM, peter macinnis wrote:
> I was in a panel last Saturday afternoon at a writers' festival in a 
> New South Wales country town.  These are things that every 
> two-or-more-horse town has, when they get writers coming in to 
> perform.  Our panel consisted of me (a writer of science and history), 
> two award-winning novelists and an artsy host.
>
> Poor host chap apparently thought 'novelist' and 'naturalist' both 
> start and end the same way, so they must be the same, but my 
> publishing record, while long, is largely devoid of fiction.  We got 
> my difference clarified in time, I survived, and he now has a working 
> definition of loose cannon (and in all likelihood, a lifelong phobia 
> concerning them).
>
> The subject before the panel was "Writing the environment".  He 
> launched us with a quote from Stephen Hero:  "My own mind, answered 
> Stephen, is more interesting to me than the entire country."  What did 
> we think of that? he asked.
>
> To be fair, the penny had dropped (after I unglued the penny and let 
> go of it) that I was a different sort of writer, but he must have been 
> in love with the sparkling intellectuality of his questions (or he was 
> a complete twit — you may have your opinion: I have mine).
>
> Knowing this, he had given the quote to me beforehand, but to be 
> unfair, he tossed it to me first, not realising that I easily pass 
> Anthony Burgess' definition of a Joycean scholar, and have even made 
> several original contributions on Malay elements in the 'Finnegans 
> Wake', elements which Burgess (a better Malay speaker than I ever was) 
> had unaccountably missed.
>
> No matter, I had played the dumb scientist card.  He never saw me 
> coming as I rode in like the Ninja Tooth Fairy.  He asked if I agreed 
> or disagreed, and I answered:  "I would agree, but only if I had a 
> head full of rocks, because without rocks, there's no geology, no 
> soil, no plants, and no wee beasties — or big beasties to eat them."
>
> That derailed him, but he recovered. Later, when we were asked about 
> the centrality of internet access in writing, one of the lady 
> novelists observed that she lived in a forest where there was no 
> internet.
>
> "Does that mean," I asked, "that if a tree fell in your forest, you 
> couldn't post it on Instagram?"  She said she now had satellite, we 
> agreed that was good, but the host anxiously dragged us toward a 
> nearby rock of artsiness.
>
> A bit later, I dragged him into the deep waters of Snow's 'Two 
> Cultures' (that is, how there seem to be two separate cultures: a 
> science one and an arts one--Snow was both a physicist and a novelist. 
> He described the Two Cultures in 1958, the year that I was told, 
> rather regally by an idiot Arts graduate, that "Boys who do Physics 
> don't DO Latin").
>
> The context was that the novelists had both encountered the ire of 
> scientists by partially imagining the environments they wrote about, 
> he knew this, and he unwisely asked me, a little pugnaciously, what I 
> thought of it.  I said the scientists were idiots playing out one side 
> of a war that some people imagine.
>
> By now, I was hitting my stride, and after describing how I was put in 
> my place, I mentioned that I still knew two Latin tags, "your mother 
> wears army boots" (which I did not give in Latin, but it is mater tua 
> caligas gerit), and "in veritas rectum es", which I declined to 
> translate for less than the price of a beer (but it is cod Latin for 
> you really are an a-hole).
>
> The other lady novelist mentioned that it used to be the custom for 
> "rude bits" to be rendered in Latin, and that she had once put some 
> harmless text in Latin so people would think it was rude.
>
> At about this point, our host was looking a bit frazzled.  He hauled 
> us to the difficulties of living in the bush that he and the forest 
> dweller suffered and the other novelist, a very urban and urbane lady 
> grinned at me.  "Felicity and I know just how you must feel," I told 
> him in a completely bored tone.  "We have the most terrible traffic 
> jams..." and she picked up the ball and ran with it.
>
> Then the bush-dwelling novelist said our travails could not compare 
> with wombat stampedes, and she ran that up to the bell.
>
> Had we been allowed another five minutes, I was going to throw in the 
> concept of autorical serendipity and the coexistentialism or otherwise 
> of Macbeth as exemplified by the witches.  People have no idea what 
> I'm talking about when I go down that sort of path, but neither do I, 
> so it's all fair.
>
> Sadly, he was taken away from me before I had finished playing with 
> him.  I had fun, and so did the novelists, but I have a feeling we may 
> all have been blacklisted.
>
> p1
>